


everybody here has seams and scars

by samyazaz



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22200958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samyazaz/pseuds/samyazaz
Summary: "Everything changes us."
Relationships: Original D&D Character(s)/Original D&D Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: The Campaign of Five Dragons





	everybody here has seams and scars

Quil's halfway to the council chamber when she comes upon Phi and Terry in the halls, coming in the other direction. She's early for her meeting, and there's time enough for her to linger a moment, to say hello and trade smiles and a kiss or two. But when she slows her steps to do so, already reaching for them, she notices their hurry, the taut set to their faces, the way tension's pulled through them both like a wire.

She falters, then steps to the side to let them pass uninterrupted, to let them get to wherever they clearly need to be. But they don't continue down the hall, they move with her, Terry catches her by the arm and draws her about, urges her along with them.

Quil blinks and stumbles a little as she tries to keep up with them, as she tries to twist and look at their faces even as they continue forwards. "What is it?" she asks, her voice already vibrating with concern. "What's happened? What's wrong?"

Terry just shakes his head, his mouth pressed tight, like he can't speak. Phi says, "Nothing's _wrong_ ," but she doesn't sound like she believes it at all.

"I have a meeting," Quil protests as they continue to hurry her along with them. "I'll be late. If this isn't an emergency..." She trails off doubtfully because everything about their demeanor says that it is, even if they won't say as much to her directly.

Terry shakes his head again, manages to speak. "All your other obligations for the day are being rescheduled."

All the _others_ , he says, not all of them, which means that there's one they've decided supersedes all the rest, and Quil's heart kicks against her breastbone at the thought of what it might be, to warrant clearing her schedule, and on such short notice.

They've whisked her away from the work before, of course, quietly arranged it with her stewards and then informed her she had the day off, when they thought she was working too hard or not resting well enough. But they'd always been all smiles, before, and gently insistent cajoling. They'd never been like this about it, alert and on-edge, and she knows this isn't them deciding she needs a break. This is something else. Something's wrong, even if they won't tell her so.

She plants her hooves, stops letting them drag her along and just stops, until they stop too, and turn back to her.

"Tell me," she says quietly, looking them both in the eye in turn. "Tell me what's happened."

Phi lets out a breath, like she's been holding it all this time, and Terry has to try twice before he can manage to make himself speak. "Someone's come," he says, and his voice cracks, and Quil reaches out instinctively to grip both their hands because she still doesn't understand but if it's bad enough to upset them this much, then she's going to need them.

"Who's come?" she asks them quietly, and doesn't let her voice tremble. "I'll meet with them, of course. In the audience hall, perhaps--"

"No," Phi says, and Quil blinks at her, and forces herself to breathe carefully and evenly. She's still gripping their hands. They're still gripping hers. It'd comfort her more, she thinks, if they acted like they thought she needed it less.

"Is it someone so important as to warrant the throne room, then?" she asks softly, feeling the weight of dread settling over her. Who could it be but a foreign dignitary, to warrant such a formal reception? What news could they bring but ill, to have Phi and Terry so alarmed?

But Terry says, "No," and then says, "they're being brought to your chambers," and Quil is at sea once again.

The only people she ever receives in her chambers are Terry and Phi themselves or their siblings, but that's not _receiving_ , really. That's just spending time with the people she loves. Phi and Terry have always been fierce advocates for her having a space of her own, just her own. It's why they correct her if she ever calls it _their_ chambers, even though they sleep there as often as she does. It's why she never receives anyone there in an official capacity.

"Why won’t either of you tell me what’s happening?" she asks, and this time her voice does wobble. "How terrible can it be, that you won’t tell me?"

Phi’s face floods with sympathy. Her and tightens in Quil’s. "It’s not terrible. It shouldn’t be," she says, at the same time that Terry says, half-strangled, "I wouldn’t know how to begin."

Neither of it is very reassuring. But Quil draws a deep, deep breath and squeezes their hands right in hers. "Okay, then," she says softly, and squares her shoulders. "Let’s go see." Nothing can be too horrible if she has the two of them at her side, can it?

They walk with her, and she can feel the urgency in both of them, can feel them thrumming with it on either side of her. But she walks with measured steps, as a queen ought. Whatever this is, whoever’s come to disturb their peace and distress her spouses, they’ll face it together, and they’ll do it with strength. She won’t let them see she’s rattled.

Her chambers are still empty once they reach them, which is no surprise. No one in the palace would make the mistake of leaving a stranger unattended in the queen’s private quarters. But even so, it’s a relief to have a moment to catch her breath, to be with her family here in this place of refuge. Far more so than the palace proper, these rooms are her home, and they’ve been fierce defenders of that, insisting that she not give it up along with everything else she’s sacrificed for the work of running a country. She can breathe a little easier here, even with trepidation twisting her stomach into knots.

"I’m going to go see where they are, and if I can't hurry them along," Phi says, almost as soon as the door has closed behind them. She looks at Quil for a moment, her brows drawn, like she’s trying to figure out what to say. In the end, she doesn’t say anything else at all, just steps in and presses a kiss to Quil’s cheek. She gives her hand one final, bolstering squeeze before she slips it out and slips away, and latches the door shut quietly behind her.

Quil stands straight, watching the door, waiting for whoever it is who’s coming. She resists the urge to fidget or fuss, soothes the urge instead by sweeping magic over her, top to tail, making sure every hair is in place, every wrinkle is smoothed out.

"We really didn’t mean to alarm you, you know," Terry says beside her, and he sounds rueful. She glances sidelong at him and finds him watching her, his gaze full of sympathy, seeing through her as neatly as he always done.

She lets the corner of her mouth curve in a thin, crooked smile. "You might’ve tried being less alarming, in that case."

He concedes the point with a chagrined grimace. He shifts his hand in hers, settles them more securely together. "It isn’t going to be terrible," he says, firm, but she can read him as easily as he does her, at this point, and he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as anyone.

They stand there together for several minutes, Quil standing tall but clinging to him, until there's a quiet, familiar knock at the door, and Quil huffs out a breath and says, "Yes, come in, of course. I've told you, you don't need to do that." But for all her teasing, she's glad of an excuse to be fond of Phi, instead of nervous about who she's brought with her.

The door opens, but only a crack, just enough for Phi to slip through. She stands there in front of it as though she'd shield Quil from whoever is waiting on the other side, and her gaze is cautious, is wary as it roves over Quil's face.

"Are you going to let them in?" Quil asks her, soft, earnest.

"I will," Phi says. "But before I do, you should know--"

Quil doesn't hear the rest of what Phi says, because behind her, from the other side of the door, and low, gentle voice says, "Adeline?", and Quil gasps, hands flying up to her mouth. Her knees buckle, and it's only because Phi is watching her so closely, because Terry is standing so near, that they're able to catch her before she drops to the ground.

Phi moved out of the doorway to do so, and there's movement behind her, someone pushing through, and Quil can't see anything but blurred colors through the tears that have sprung up in her eyes, but she doesn't have to see to know the sound of her name in that gentle voice, and she reaches with trembling arms from where she still stands, half-collapsed in Phi and Terry's arms, and her hands are shaking, and her voice is shaking, when she says, _"Mama?"_

"Oh," says her mother's voice, soft and wounded and joyful, and the blurred colors move abruptly and there are arms around her, drawing her in, pulling her close. "Oh, my girl," her mother breathes, clasping Quil to her.

Quil would shake off Phi and Terry's arms, but she doesn't have to, they're already relinquishing her, giving her over to her mother's embrace.

Quil draws a deep, shuddering breath with her face pressed to her mother's dress, and her lungs fill with the scents of herbs, sharp and pungent and just exactly as she remembered, and her meager strength gives out and she collapses to her knees, there at her mother's feet with her mother's arms around her, with the lovely, comforting smell of her filling each shuddering breath as though she'd never left at all, and Quil clings to her and weeps desperately.

"Oh darling," her mother breathes down over her, like a benediction. "Oh, sweetheart. I'd hardly even dared to hope."

"He told me you were dead," Quil cries, between horrible, wracking sobs. "He said-- He said--"

"I was told much the same." A hand strokes over Quil's hair, presses to her cheek, wipes the tears away but not as fast as they fall. "I never believed it."

"I didn't want to," Quil says, broken. "I didn't, but I-- I know Sending now." She sits back on her haunches and wipes her eyes clear, and gazes up at the loving, joyful, aching face of her mother, and feels as small of a child as she ever was. "I could've Sent to you, and known. I wanted to. Every day, I've wanted to. But if you hadn't answered-- If you weren't--" And she covers her face and cries into her hands once more, shuddering with it, shaking with it.

Her mother sinks down, kneeling with her, clutching Quil to her chest, and she lets Quil weep, and weeps with her. And when the storm of it has passed through her, Quil leans heavily in her mother's embrace, breathing unsteadily and feeling wrung out, but her eyes are dry, even if her cheeks are still sodden.

Her mother knows, of course. She always knows, and she waits until Quil can bear it before she sets her back, just a little, and strokes her hands over her cheeks, and looks at her with such joy and such heartache as she murmurs, "Look how you've grown."

Quil chokes on a laugh and shakes her head. _"Me?"_ she says, wry, and lifts a hand to draw her fingers along the grey in her mother's hair. She wears streaks of it now, where there'd been only threads the last time Quil had seen her.

Her mother smiles a little, acknowledging, but then sobers again and only answers, "Yes. You." She cups Quil's face in her hands and looks at her, her gaze scanning over her face, too serious.

Quil wonders what she sees there, what changes time has wrought, too slowly for Quil herself to have noticed.

"A tiefling queen, they said," her mother murmurs, her brow pinched, and hovers a hand over her hair as though all at once afraid to touch her. "And I never thought-- I never dared _dream_ it might be my Adeline." Quil catches her hand and presses it to her cheek, squeezes her eyes shut as her thumb strokes Quil's brow, traces the curve of a horn. Her mother hesitates, just a moment, then ventures, "Tranquility, they call you. Is that a regnal name?"

Quil takes a shuddering breath, shakes her head. "No. I've been Tranquility longer than I've been queen." Her hands flutter helplessly before her for a moment, before she clasps them around handfuls of her skirt. "It was... Aspirational. A wish. It was what I was looking for. What I hoped for."

Her mother is so solemn, looks so quietly pained, as she gazes down at her, as she strokes her fingers through her hair and across her face, like she used to do when Quil was a child, when she needed comforting. It almost makes Quil choke on a twisted laugh. She's a queen now. She's a child still, and desperately grateful for her mother's soothing touch.

"Tranquility," her mother says again, softly, as though testing the shape of the name, the weight and cadence of it. "And have you found that, my darling girl? Has it guided you to what you seek?"

Quil glances over her shoulder, then, to Phi and Terry, who are standing a short distance away, holding tight to one another and watching her with such concern and such cautious, fledgling hope. She smiles at them helplessly, watches the way it makes Phi hitch a breath, how Terry clasps her hand tighter and smiles back at her and his face shines like a sun. "It found me," she says softly, and turns back to look up at her mother.

Her mother's gaze flicks between her and them, and there's a question written there in the crease of her brows, and then there's understanding. She leans in to kiss Quil's brow, and when she draws back, there are tears shining in her eyes again, but she's smiling. "I'm so glad," she says, low and hoarse. "I'm so glad you've had people near you to love you, when I could only do so from afar."

It makes Quil's eyes prickle and burn again, tears threatening once more, because she didn't, for so long she didn't. She was alone, and then she was Seath's.

But Seath is dead, and she has had long, wonderful years of knowing love, of seeing it shine from Terry and Phi's faces whenever they looked at her. She has their bracelet on her wrist and a heart so full of love for them it feels like it could burst, most days. And it'll only hurt her mother to tell her how she suffered, when she could tell her instead about everything else.

A heart full to bursting, she's always said, she's always thought. But even at her happiest, even when she never let herself mention them, there's always been two deep, quiet corners of her heart that have been empty. Waiting.

And now her mother is here before her, and her chest is so tight it hurts, and it's joy but it's also fear because-- "Mama," she makes herself say, choking on the words. "Where's Cordelia?"

She's braced for the answer to be terrible, for her mother's eyes to cloud with grief, for the careful, delicate way she's always delivered unpleasant truths. She waits for it, and tells herself that even having this much of her family back is an unlooked-for gift, and cause for joy -- but her mother smiles at her, gently, and kisses her brow again, and says, "She's here, darling. Of course she's here. Your friends thought it might be best if we didn't overwhelm you all at once, is all." Her gaze slips over Quil's shoulder, towards Phi and Terry. "Can we--"

"Of course," Phi says, at the same time that Quil drags herself up onto her hooves and then stands there, trembling, asking, "Where is she?"

"Just out in the hall," her mother says, and Quil starts toward the door, calling, _"Cordelia,"_ in a voice that she can't keep steady no matter how hard she tries.

She only makes it two steps before the door's pushed open further, and her sister's standing there in the doorway, her arms wrapped tight around her ribs like it's the only thing keeping her together, tears already staining her cheeks, but she's smiling, tremulously, and her voice breaks when she says, "Adeline."

Quil breaks, too, can't hold herself back any longer, races across the distance between them even as Cordelia is stumbling forward, arms unwrapping from around herself to reach for Quil, and Quil envelops her in her arms and clutches her to her, holds her crushed against her chest and breathes unsteadily against the crown of her head.

She's taller now than she was the last time Quil did this, when she'd had to stoop to reach her. Now, she has to rise onto the tips of her hooves to manage it, and she whispers unhappily against her sister's hair, "You grew up."

Cordelia steps back, just half a step, but enough that Quil must loosen her grip. She closes her hands on Cordelia's shoulders instead, doesn't let her go any farther than arm's length, can't. Cordelia looks up at her with a crooked smile, eyes still shining with tears, and reaches a hand up to touch Quil's coronet, fingers brushing against the petals of the flowers fashioned there. "Not as much as you, it seems," she sys, but that's a lie, Quil was young when she left home, young enough for Seath to claim her as a ward, but she was closer to woman than to child, all the same. Cordelia had been a girl, and now she's a woman grown, and Quil's heart aches for the years she's missed with her. That they've missed with each other.

"How--" Her voice breaks on the question she has to ask, the question whose answer she dreads. "How are you?"

Cordelia knows what she's asking, Quil can see it in her eyes, in the way her face goes just a little sad and a little tired, a little reluctant, and Quil's breath is already sawing through her throat. But Cordelia says, "I'm okay," lifts a hand and presses it to Quil's cheek and says, _"I'm okay_ , Adi. I am."

Quil shuts her eyes for a moment and feels like the ground has fallen out from beneath her, like she's falling, weightless. "You're not," she says softly. Even now, Quil can see it. Cordelia had been vivacious, before she'd found the portal and decided to explore. She'd been full of life and joy and enthusiasm for the world. She hadn't carried herself so carefully, hadn't looked so wounded, even behind her joy.

"I can help you," Quil says, all on a rush. "I can-- I can try, I can figure out how. I'm better with my magic now, I'm so much better--"

But Cordelia just smiles up at her, sadly, and shakes her head. "No, Adi."

Quil's heart clenches so hard it's painful. "I won't hurt you, I swear. I _wear_. Never again. I'm so much better than I was. And there's-- there's Allan, he knows so many spells, _he_ could help, surely he knows, or knows how to find--"

Cordelia just keeps smiling up at her like it hurts her, and keeps shaking her head, slow and sure. "I'm all right," she says again, soft and solemn.

Quil stares down at her through the tears welling in her eyes again, blurring her vision again. "I wanted to help you," she whispers, aching. "I've always wanted to help you."

"I know," Cordelia says, fierce all at once. "You always have."

Quil shakes her head desperately. "Not with this. Not when you _needed_ me."

"You came after me," Cordelia says softly. "You brought me home."

Quil's hands spasm on her sister's shoulder. She wants to drag her back into her arms and never let her out of them. "It wasn't enough."

"Adi," Cordelia breathes. "It was _everything_."

Quil chokes on her tears, shakes her head wildly. "It wasn't. You're still-- Something's still _wrong_. Isn't it?"

And Cordelia doesn't deny it. She just says, again, "I'm all right," says, "I've gotten better at carrying it."

Quil could weep again, could rage, could burn the whole world down around them in fury over what's been done to her sister, what she's been forced to endure. "You shouldn't have to," she says, ferocious. "It changed you, it _did_ , you're different, you have been ever since-- You shouldn't have to, you should get to just _be--_ "

Cordelia smiles crookedly, and she looks like she means it at the same time as she looks so sad. "I am," she says softly, a confession she was never willing to make when they were girls. Her gaze lifts, to Quil's coronet again. She presses a hand to Quil's stomach, just to the side, deliberate enough to make Quil wonder if the stories of Tyne's queen, and her coronation gown, and her scars, managed to reach all the way to their mother's shop, to their home. Of course they would have.

"Aren't you?" Cordelia asks softly, and Quil's breath hitches. "Everything changes us."

"It _hurt you_. I wanted to-- I wanted to make it better." _I wanted to make_ you _better_.

"I know," Cordelia says. "I know. You've always wanted to protect me."

"I'm your _sister_."

And Cordelia smiles at her, finally smiles in a way that reaches her eyes. "You're my sister," she agrees softly. "That's all I've ever needed you to be." She gives a sudden, sharp burst of laughter, and it transforms her face, like the sun emerging from behind heavy clouds. "And now I have you _back_." And she steps into Quil's arms again, presses in tight and presses her cheek to Quil's chest and wraps her arms around her waist like she never means to let her go. Quil holds her just as tight, just as fierce. They hold each other.

It's long, long minutes later before Quil manages to part them, before she's even willing to try, and then it's only by saying, "Cordelia, if you don't let me go, how am I ever going to introduce you to my wife, and my husband?"

Cordelia squawks in indignation, in shock and joy and outrage, as Quil knew she would, and Quil lets her go, but keeps Cordelia's hand firmly in hers, and Cordelia holds onto her just as fiercely, and Quil's smiling, is laughing, as she turns to Phi and Terry, to introduce the two halves of her family to each other, to start the work of stitching them together, of making them whole, and her chest aches, her heart aches, sharp and fierce and joyful and bittersweet and glad, and somehow there's room enough within her for it all, after all.

She reaches with the hand that isn't clutching Cordelia's, and Phi takes it, and Quil holds onto them both, on either side of her, surrounding her. And she smiles at them all, the family she knew, the family she found, and draws a deep breath, and begins to make the introductions.


End file.
